Service providers worldwide are facing a mounting problem of flattening revenues coupled with increasing costs brought forth by increasing usage of bandwidth, growing churn, subscriber saturation and competitive price pressures. These mobile and broadband providers are facing challenges in delivering new revenue generating services while seeing their over the top (OTT) counterparts reaping rewards with content delivered over the networks they built and maintained over the years.
The vast majority of these OTT services are delivered over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the de-facto protocol for application development and delivery. Be it video, social networking, search, or advertising, over fixed line as well as mobile applications, it is most likely running on top of HTTP. However, this protocol is also the most processing intensive protocol for network devices. Hence practically any increase in usage results in an increase in the pressure on the service providers.
Certainly one way to control traffic on the Internet requires various levels of understanding of the traffic that flows through the network which is also increasing in its level of sophistication. Various systems and solutions have been offered to enable deep-packet-inspection (DPI) to enable an ever sophisticated ability to shape the traffic on the network. This ability allows the service providers to better manage the network and its related resources, provide a higher level of quality of service (QoS) in the hopes to increase revenues and profits. However, the rapid increase in the delivery of heavy bandwidth consuming data, such as video, and consumption thereof, requires a new level of handling that is not available today in prior art solutions. A known problem is the access of a user node to a content source and subsequently the access by another user node to the same content, resulting in additional load on the content provider and on the entire network. When, for example, popular video clips are accessed there is a significant and noticeable degradation of the network performance that may even lead to a network failure. Some prior art solutions attempt to store all the data in caches, however, with the huge amounts of data and the need to inspect each and every packet, regardless of its source, makes this a daunting and impractical task.
It would be advantageous to provide service providers with a solution that will enable them to effectively manage and control the delivery of heavy bandwidth consuming data such that the overall bandwidth requirements are loaded and better shared across the network in general, and in particular within the network of a specific service provider.